Gold-Level Tips for Smaller Sites

chitikainc

4 years ago

Earlier this week on Digital Point, Chitika publisher Chris discussed how he got his forum, DeadMansCrossZone.com, upgraded to Gold level while attracting a relatively small audience – tens of thousands of impressions per day. While we’ve discussed major considerations in terms of getting your site Gold account ready, here we’ll be discussing some of the unique considerations for smaller websites looking to achieve Gold account status as quickly as possible.

Earlier this week on Digital Point, Chitika publisher Chris discussed how he got his forum, DeadMansCrossZone.com, upgraded to Gold level while attracting a relatively small audience – tens of thousands of impressions per day. In Chris’ case, his site’s CPMs went up by 10 to 30X following the upgrade. For some of our publishers, the returns are even higher.

While we’ve discussed major considerations in terms of getting your site Gold account ready, here we’ll be discussing some of the unique considerations for smaller websites looking to achieve Gold account status as quickly as possible. Use this guide as a kind of checklist – if your site meets criteria one and two, email us to get your site reviewed for Gold-level ads!

Step 1: Make your site as nice-looking to advertisers as possible

As part of the Gold account review process, your site is evaluated by our network of advertising partners. While not all sites make the cut, keep in mind that even specialized sites with a niche audience can still be very attractive properties for advertisers. As a site owner, the good news is that much of this is within your control. We go over this in depth within our prior blog post, but the highest priorities for site owners should be:

Cleaning up the site in terms of removing full-page or distracting pop ups, any broken images or links, and/or pervasive profanity or any adult content

Consistency in terms of content focus, along with a clean, customized look and feel

Step 2: Generate healthy traffic levels

While increasing the number of site visitors is good, keep in mind that any traffic to your site should be coming from legitimate sources. This includes search engines, social networking sites, or links back from other sites such as blogrolls, citations, etc. Additionally, the more U.S. and Canadian traffic the better – our advertisers pay the most for these impressions.

Explicitly buying traffic from third-party suppliers (e.g. $100 for 1,000,000 impressions) is risky, and may qualify as spam, resulting in a suspension of your account.

Step 3: Let us know you want to go Gold!

If you feel your site fulfills all of the criteria above, send us a note at support@chitika.com!

As a heads up, the review cycle with our network of advertising partners typically takes anywhere from 2-4 weeks. If your site is approved you’ll immediately get an email from us, and once you log in to the PartnerCenter, you’ll see a Gold medal next to the applicable domain in Ads>Settings>My Domains.